With the advent of the computer age, computer and software users have grown accustomed to user-friendly software applications that help them write, calculate, organize, prepare presentations, send and receive electronic mail, make music, and the like. Modem word processing applications, for example, allow users to create and edit a variety of useful documents. Modem desktop publishing applications, for another example, allow users to create a variety of useful documents and presentations such as newspapers, newsletters, brochures, advertisement layouts, stationery, and the like.
Some software applications, such as word processing applications and desktop publishing applications allow users to use pre-defined templates (templates) to prepare new templates. For example, a template may be provided by a word processing application for preparing a resume template, and the template may have placeholders or text boxes for receiving certain types and amounts of information such as a user's personal data and employment history. Another example template may be provided by a desktop publishing application for preparing a newsletter, and the template may have placeholders or text boxes for headlines, pictures, stories, etc. Often users add or edit content to or in a first or starting template, but later decide to copy the content added to or edited in the first template to a different template. For example, a user may add content to or edit content in a newspaper-style template having placeholders for content arranged in long, narrow columns. Later, the user may desire to map the content from the newspaper-style template to a newsletter-style template having placeholders for content arranged according to a different structure.
Some prior systems require users to copy and paste content (piece-by-piece) from a starting template into a target template. Other prior systems allow for placeholders in different templates to be tagged for identification so that content from a starting template may be automatically copied to matching placeholders in a target template. However, such systems do not support user-inserted content (not conforming to a tagging scheme of the template) or content intended for one use that is inserted into a placeholder in a second template intended for another use, for example, story text entered into a headline placeholder in an article template.
Accordingly, there is a need for a method and system for improved mapping of content from a first or starting template to a target template. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present invention has been made.